Apple CEO Steve Jobs, or at least his email account, is source of
controversial recent exchange on iPhone antenna

Emails from Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s account apparently dismissing problems with iPhone signal strength shortly before the company acknowledged that there was an issue are authentic, claims popular blog Boy Genius Report.

In a detailed post listing a complex string of email headers and other supporting evidence, the blog defends its original post in which Jobs tells a user, later identified as Jason Burford, to “calm down” and that he is “most likely in an area with very low signal strength” before adding "we are working on it".

After the initial post was published, Apple PR representatives had suggested either that Jobs’s emails are not actually written by the CEO, or that the exchange had been fabricated.

Now, however, the company has acknowledged that there are issues with the iPhone 4. Despite Jobs’s statement tell Burford “you are getting all worked up over a few days of rumors. Calm down”, Apple now says that it was "stunned" to find that "the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength".

Many commentators, however, have questioned whether the problems with iPhone 4 relate to how the phone displays signal strength, or to reception itself on the phone which uses an innovative new kind of antenna, embedded in the edge of the handset. The company has promised a fix within a few weeks.